At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
Here’s a sweet story of friendship, family, and love. Every five years my close friends from Haverford College gather for our class of 1978 reunion. These are don’t-miss affairs for me, and for them. Memorial Day weekend marked our 45th reunion. I attended this year because those friendships produced entirely unanticipated virtues. In March, Gabrielle scheduled hip replacement surgery two weeks prior to the reunion. Our email train includes the fellas and their wives, all …
Water is not my beverage of choice. That is, until deer started eating my lilies. After I balked at online chemical repellents that cost as much as $199, Gabrielle reminded me that deer wouldn’t eat anything sprayed with urine. I began chugging water like it was a cold lager on a hot day. I now collect the non-toxic, organic, aromatic waste stream daily in wide-mouth kambucha jars. Every evening the contents are liberally poured onto …
IOWA CITY, IOWA — There’s no mystery that fertilizer and manure running off farm fields are the primary cause of Iowa’s wretched water quality. Farm fields laden with synthetic fertilizers and manure produce bounties of over 2 billion bushels of corn each year. Data from the Iowa Water Quality Information System, the state’s advanced monitoring network, shows those same fields also produce a torrent of run-off that contaminates virtually every mile of streams and rivers …
In the realm of the important-but-obscure, a place I’ve resided for most of my professional life, Chris Jones is a hero. A research engineer at the University of Iowa, Jones studies and writes with masterful expertise about agriculture, the environment, and water. Put those three elements together, and consider that state and federal law essentially immunizes crop and livestock farms from responsibly managing their nitrogen and phosphorus wastes. The result is a disturbing but familiar …
With the exception of federal and state programs to convert corn into ethanol and soybeans into biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks the United States has never regarded farming as a primary energy producer. That changed when Congress passed the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act last August. The law provides $140 billion in tax incentives, direct loans, and grants to replace fossil fuels with cleaner renewable energy that lowers emissions of carbon dioxide. …
Before the country scrambled itself into an almost unrecognizable mess. Well before actually, there was a place on Chicago’s South Side called Theresa’s Lounge where every weekend the city’s best Blues were played in a deep song voice and a melancholy tone. Junior Wells and Buddy Guy were regulars. So was James Cotton. I was once at Theresa’s in 1982 with a friend when Cotton walked in off the street, took his spot on stage, …
Earlier this year I was awarded an investigative fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to pursue the causes and serious consequences of farm-related nutrient pollution in the nine-state Corn Belt at the center of the country. The project, undertaken with the collaboration of Circle of Blue, The New Lede, and The Guardian, builds on what I learned in 2022 reporting for Circle of Blue on phosphorus contamination for “Danger Looms Where Algae Blooms.” When I …
BENZONIA – This could have been a miserable Thanksgiving. It’s not. On November 8 sane Americans voted their disapproval for the dreadful politics of MAGA America. Never more so than in Michigan. Even in our three-county corner of the lower peninsula Democrats and sufficient numbers of disgusted Republicans voted to reject election-denying, Trump-supported candidates and re-elect the incumbent Democratic governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. Having cast off the psychic weight of election dread, …
For decades, Americans mostly turned a blind eye to the industrial-scale livestock production operations that churn out cheap supplies of meat and dairy for the masses. Occasional opposition to local pollution problems and the casual animal cruelty that characterize conventional US dairy, hog, and poultry production did little to alter practices that are embedded in the rural landscape. That may be changing. A wave of frontline resistance is now breaking across the Upper Midwest and …
In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identified phosphorus and nitrogen discharges from U.S. farmland as the single greatest challenge to our nation’s water quality. That assessment followed years of confirming high concentrations of farm nutrients in surface and groundwater reserves, and dozens of peer-reviewed epidemiology studies that cited both compounds as a threat to public health. The agency proposed to identify those responsible and develop strategies to reduce nutrient pollution. That plan died the following year. …
